Disaster Recovery:

OverDrive affords the ability to define an unlimited number of ‘response scenarios’ to any type of potential outage or emergency. Special DR policies can be created and set to a ‘pending’ state where they will remain until activated with a single keystroke. Upon activation, these DR policies can implement fundamental changes in the network in a matter of seconds. If necessary, DR policies can even reconfigure entire logical networks, topologies and critical access to key applications and services.

Product Sheet - Disaster Recovery

Communications infrastructures have become more and more critical to the viability of all businesses. With all the challenges facing infrastructure managers, business continuity and disaster recovery is one of the key topics weighing heavily on any IT manager’s mind…

“Will my communications infrastructure continue to support the business if a major outage occurs in the network? How long will it take to recover and restore critical services? Am I prepared for the unlimited number of potential emergency scenarios?”

If these, or similar questions, keep you awake at night, then OverDrive for the Enterprise™ is the business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solution you have been seeking. A fully automated, policy-based, network infrastructure control and management solution that enables network engineers to define multiple response scenarios that can be implemented instantaneously as failures of critical network components or services are detected.

OverDrive BCDR response scenarios, defined as policies, automatically drive configuration updates down to the appropriate network devices (routers, switches and converged firewall's). These BCDR policies, when initiated, dynamically modify, in real-time, the underlying logical communications infrastructure in order to quickly respond to the outage.

The OverDrive BCDR capabilities are illustrated in the following example where a typical enterprise network configuration is controlled and managed using OverDrive policies. These policies define the logical footprint and behavior of the primary day-to-day network that supports the business including the network routes, secure VPN tunnels, firewall ACL's, switched VLAN's and other infrastructure services and devices.

Policies define the primary network routes (in green) connecting the remote sites to the primary data center and the primary data center to the secondary data center for the purpose of data and application redundancy. Additionally, users and groups of users are connected to defined applications through policy-enabled VLAN's (in orange).

BCDR policies are created, placed in a pending state, and define a completely different logical network configuration. In the event of a critical device failure disabling the primary data center, the BCDR policies could be implemented, with a single key-stroke, dynamically reconstructing the logical network in seconds without any device-level manual intervention required.

The new BCDR network automatically created via policy connects the remote sites to the secondary data center (in red) and further establishes user-based VLAN access to the defined redundant applications (in yellow).

With OverDrive, network engineers can now define response scenarios for any number of potential outages or problems that may occur. Additionally, the use of dynamic policies to address network outages automatically, without manually touching a device or command-line, enables network teams to respond faster and ensure critical business systems and processes are restored with minimal interruption. 

Benefits for the Enterprise:

• OverDrive allows infrastructure managers to define business continuity and disaster recovery policies that address any number of potential infrastructure failures or scenarios.

• Policies can be initiated with a single keystroke and dynamically change the underlying logical network fabric in real-time. No more long emergency sessions on multiple device command lines working to rebuild infrastructure connectivity or work-a-rounds.

• Policies initiate multiple infrastructure services including routing, VPN connectivity, VLAN connections and firewall ACL's across any number of deployed devices simultaneously with no manual intervention required.

• The policies that define and control the day-to-day network along with the BCDR network are all persisted in the OverDrive policy so when the outage is resolved the original logical network can be quickly restored to the original state.

• Because network changes are done through policies persisted in OverDrive, compliance is assured, even as dramatic changes are made to the network infrastructure.